Data centres, the invisible infrastructure that decides the competitiveness of countries

The Milan Polytechnic Observatory estimates investments of EUR 7.1 billion in the two-year period 2023-2025, with a forecast of over EUR 25 billion by 2028 and 80 new projects.

However, the gap between announcements and 'grounding' of construction sites remains risky due to uncertain authorisation times.

To bridge this gap, the government is recognising the strategic nature of these works by overcoming the old urban planning logics. This change of step is visible in the PNRR and the National Strategic Plan (PSN) and in the activation of fast lanes ('Fast Track') to simplify bureaucracy for foreign investments.

The results are beginning to show, as confirmed by Microsoft's EUR 4.3 billion for the Cloud Region Italy North, which, together with the consolidation of AWS and Oracle, testify to the attractiveness of Sistema Paese. It remains a priority, however, not to slow down in the face of a very competitive European landscape where Spain is transforming Aragon into a digital hub with investments in the billions, as demonstrated by the AWS plan of around EUR 16 billion, while France is pushing hard on technological sovereignty with the 'France 2030' plan.

The infrastructural advantage, however, risks remaining unfulfilled without a strengthening of venture capital. Data centres enable computing capacity, but do not automatically generate industrial value: it is venture capital that enables deep-tech start-ups to transform this power into products and industrial champions. Italy's lag in finance for innovation remains a structural knot to be unravelled to avoid being just a host country.

Physical infrastructure and financial resources only account for two-thirds of the equation as 'AI Factories' remain empty boxes without expertise. They must therefore be 'filled' with human capital capable of managing complex cloud architectures and developing algorithmic models. It is no coincidence that the major industrial plans of Big Tech now include chapters devoted to the digital upskilling of thousands of professionals, an asset as intangible as it is essential.

This is a particularly critical issue for Italia, where, according to a survey conducted on behalf of IT4LIA (the Italian AI Factory), as many as 65% of a sample of 200 different subjects including companies, SMEs, start-ups and research centres ranked lack of skills as the main obstacle to the adoption of advanced AI models.

Finally, the real bottleneck, however, is likely to be energy, with a figure from Terna that takes a snapshot of the urgency, highlighting how in 2025 connection requests for new data centres reached 68.5 GW, one hundred times the installed power, an unequivocal signal that reiterates the need to equip ourselves with a network adequate to withstand the impact.

In this complex framework where various factors contribute to the achievement of strategic goals, the objective is not to turn Italia into a mere 'data warehouse' for third parties, but to anchor data centre infrastructures to the territories and needs of companies and research centres. We need to create ecosystems where supercomputing enables manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and finance and encourages technology transfer. The country must equip itself with tools capable of attracting strategic investment by creating a virtuous circle between national priorities and research, making data centres, AI and computing infrastructure the pivot of a new economic and industrial development strategy for the country.

(*) Public policy expert. Opinions expressed do not bind the institution to which they belong